12K views · 279 reactions | Imagens do lançamento do Mercury-Atlas 4 e do seu voo orbital, realizado em 13 de setembro de 1961. Esse foi o primeiro voo orbital do projeto Mercury. Créditos: NASA/Jason Major | Ned Oliveira / Astronomia | Facebook

CONVAIR LV-3B / SM-65D ATLAS The rocket on display represents the launch vehicle for USAF Major Gordon Cooper’s Mercury-Atlas 9 mission on May 15-16, 1963. His was the final and longest Mercury mission, lasting more than 34 hours. In his spacecraft Faith 7, Cooper orbited the Earth 22 times. #spacegeek | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force

September 9th - on this day in 1959, NASA launched Big Joe 1, an uncrewed, suborbital test flight of a boilerplate Mercury capsule, on an Atlas-D Mercury rocket from Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral. The flight was to test the spacecraft's ablative heat shield during a reentry test. However, the Atlas rocket's booster engines failed to jettison and the dead weight resulted in the flight not reaching the expected velocity and altitude. The Big Joe Mercury capsule splashed down intact, though,